A variety of methods are known for making ceramic cores suitable for use in producing cast gas-turbine blades. These prior art methods include the step of covering the ceramic core with a protective coating such as an epoxy or phenolic resin to prevent the very fragile core from breaking during handling. However, the protective coating is undesirable in that it prevents subsequent mechanical work from being performed on the core, such as providing further detail or drilling holes in the core. Thereafter, the core is covered by a wax or plastic by injection molding to form a pattern of the blade or component to be cast. These steps are expensive and time consuming.
Thus, it would be desirable to provide a method of making a gas-turbine blade or component by a simple method which avoids the need to build ceramic core dies or wax pattern dies, and eliminates the need for handling the core in a fragile state and eliminates the injection molding step to produce a pattern around the core.